I want to give a disclaimer - I did not plan to do anything in the first few days of this trip because I had no idea how jet lag would affect us. There are many things that I'd like to see and do in Paris, and I never had the idea that I would even come close to doing them in one visit. I'm not really a trophy hunter, where I need to check off the important tourist items in a new place. I also like to do things spontaneously, even though it doesn't always work out. When looking into the Paris Metro system and all the trains that entails, I figured we'd get a Paris Visite pass, but didn't order it ahead of time because I wasn't sure about when we would use it. That was maybe a mistake. For any future Paris visitors, let me share a few amusing things.
We decided to go to Versailles for the afternoon and evening (Saturday the 3rd) because they light up the fountains and the gardens on Saturday nights in the summer. This time, while it was very humid, the weather had broken due to the thunderstorms and was in the 80s instead of the 90s. We were feeling good when we got to the train station, arriving just after a group of three nuns.
They were speaking Italian to each other in hushed tones at the ticket kiosk. One of them turned around and asked us for help understanding the machine. "Jensepa Francais" says my husband. They gesture their understanding of our lack of Frenchness, and then we see what is wrong. They have cash and they need Euro coins. The machine does not accept bills, you see. that would be way too convenient.
Well, who could resist a sweet sister nun in need? We proffer the Euro coins and the nuns wave their hands - they don't want to accept them. But the train comes in 6 minutes. No really, we insist again, and they change their minds and take them graciously. We step up to the machine to buy our tickets. Long agonizing five minutes made short: the machine does not accept American credit cards, as they do not have a microchip that the rest of the world uses in their cards as an anti-fraud measure. Wait, what? That's right - second day in a row, we get stymied at the station.
Daunted, but persistent, we went to a larger station that has a human working. The human is at an information kiosk. The human does not take, nor does the human sell any sort of ticket or pass, the human only dispenses information. In French, naturally. The human tells us that we can go to a tobac, which is a French smoke shop, to buy books of train tickets that we can then use one at a time. Which we do. It is too late now to go to Versailles, so we spend the rest of the afternoon in the 16eme, which feels quite familiar now.
Hopefully our nuns enjoyed whatever it was they wanted to do that afternoon. And maybe they said a little prayer for us to be able to do so ourselves!
Tomorrow we leave for a week in the south of France. Jet lag seems to have faded into the background (that's 3 days worth of lag) and we are girding ourselves for the French highways.
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